Today, children and teen-agers are well aware of the global threats to the environment, but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature on a day-to-day basis, is fading.
Yet, at the very moment that the bond between the young and the natural world is in danger of breaking, a growing body of research links mental, physical and spiritual health directly to nature experiences. Helping kids spend time outdoors, whether camping, hiking, building a tree-house or just listening to the leaves move, is one of the greatest gifts we can give children. Aside from the immediate delights, we are providing a form of insurance for their long-term health and happiness.
This is expecially true when we consider the alarming growth rate of child obesity. The link between outdoors activity and physical health is clear. Other important benefits are less obvious, but no less valid.
“Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity,” says Robin Moore, and international authority on the designs of children’s play and learning environments. For example, in Sweden, Australia, Canada and the United States, studies of children in schoolyards with both areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas.
 Time outside in natural environments also stimulates cognitive functioning. Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University, developed his influential theory of multiple intelligences in 1983. Gardner argued that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, war far too limited; he instead proposed seven types of intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. A few years ago, he added an eighth intelligence: naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”), which can apply to every child. A 2005 study by the California Department of Education found that students in schools with nature-immersion programs performed 27 percent better in science testing than kids in traditional classrooms.
Nature time can also be a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child’s life. More than 100 studies of children and adults reveal one of the main benefits of spending time in nature to be stess reduction. This is important news. A 2003 survey published in the Journal of Psychiatric Services found the rate at which American children are prescribed antidepressants almost doubled in 5 years; the steepend increase – 66 percent – was among preschool children. While nature experience is not a panacea, or a substitute for appropriate medication, it can help relieve the everyday pressures that may lead to childhood depression.
Some of the most exciting research is being conducted by the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, showing that contact with the natural world significantly reduced symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder in Children as young as age 5. I am moved when I hear how parents notice significant changes in their hyperactive child’s behavior when they take them hiking or encourage them to enjoy other nature-oriented outings.
Outdoor-adventure programs stimulate the development of interpersonal competencies, enhance leadership skills, hand have positive effects on adolescents’ senses of empowerment, self-control, independence, self-understanding, assertiveness and decision-making skills. Camping programs used to facilitate emotional well being since the early 1900s, increase self-esteem, especially for pre-teens. Studies over the past decade have shown that participants in adventure-therapy programs made gains in self-esteem, leadership, academics, personality and interpersonal relations. “These changes were shown to be more stable over time than the changes generated in more traditional education programs,” according to Dene S. Berman and Jennifer Davids-Berman, in a review of such programs for the Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools.
Children with disabilities also benefit. One study of 15
residential summer camp programs
with specialized programs for
children with disabilities — including
learning disabilities, autism, sensory
disabilities, moderate and severe
cognitive disabilities, physical
disabilities and traumatic brain injury — revealed that participating
children demonstrated improved initiative and self-direction that
transferred to their lives at home and in school.
When outside in woods or fields or on water, children stretch
all of their senses, something they do not do in front of a screen. For all
children, natural play strengthens children’s self-confidence and
arouses their senses — by that I mean their awareness of the world and
all the moves in it, seen and unseen. Nature offers a window to wonder
that no video game can provide. Nature, the sublime, the harsh and the
beautiful, offers the young an environment where they can easily
contemplate infinity and eternity.
A child can, on a rare clear night, see the stars and perceive
the infinite; nature cuts to the chase, exposes the young directly and
immediately to the very elements from which humans evolved: earth,
water, air and other living kin, large and small. Mountains, fields,
streams, lakes, forest and desert contain a near-infinite reservoir of
information, and therefore the potential for inexhaustible new
discoveries. Nature also stimulates a sense
of place, and helps us find our place.
As author and biologist Robert Michael
Pyle writes, “Place is what takes me out of
myself, out of the limited scope of human
activity, but this is not misanthropic.
A sense of place is a way of embracing humanity among all of its
neighbors. It is an entry into the larger world.”
Now it’s up to us to make sure future generations have this
connection, and the gifts it gives. A movement is growing to connect
children to nature, to combat what I have called “nature-deficit
disorder.” This increased awareness of the natural environment has
great value for all of us, for in addition to illuminating the health and
cognitive benefits of nature, research shows that people who care
deeply about the environment almost always had some transcendent
experience in nature when they were children.
Clearly, the long-term health of the earth depends on our
saving an often-overlooked indicator species, the child in nature.
Richard Louv is the author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
For more information on the movement to connect children to nature, see www.richardlouv.com or www.cnaturenet.org.
($13.95 in paperback, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) Available wherever books are sold.
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